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From: karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: C Compilers
Summary: ...a game of catchup between the two CC vendors
Message-ID: <3342@sugar.uu.net>
Date: 27 Jan 89 01:36:27 GMT
References: <496@geocub.UUCP> <30997@vax1.tcd.ie> <7261@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston, TX
Lines: 51

With regard to the discussion of which C compiler is better, as Dan Riley
says, it determines on which versions you compare.

First there was only Lattice, so for a while it was the best choice because 
it was the only choise.

Then came Aztec, which at the time produced faster, smaller code, didn't
need as much disk space for the compiler and such, and compiled programs 
significantly more quickly.  At that time there were few if any hard disks, 
so many people found these advangates to be rather compelling.  There was a 
matter of the additional cost of buying another compiler and no doubt this 
affected many decisions as to which way to go.

A subsequent Lattice release (4.0?) put Lattice back on top, with
better performance.  I'm not sure when function prototypes arrived
for Lattice (they haven't yet for Aztec), but they are really good for
catching bugs, and I wish Aztec had them (more on that in a bit.)

Aztec then came out with the 3.4 release.  The big improvement here was 'sdb',
a windowing symbolic debugger that, despite some bugs and problems debugging
certain code constructs, has been a tremendous productivity improver, for me 
at last.  This, in my opinion, caused Aztec to again achieve predominance over 
Lattice.

Lattice subsequently came out with their own debugger and made other
improvments in the compiler.  They also have come out with C++, although
users on the net haven't been terribly impressed with it in its current
form.  I think right now, Lattice is a bit ahead of Aztec, but not 
substantially enough for an Aztec 3.6 user to make the jump.

I haven't examined the code generated by Lattice, but Aztec's leaves much to 
be desired.  It's frustrating to see the compiler moving values from a
perfectly useful d-register into another d-register to perform a calculation
on it.  Also, it does stuff like dereferencing a chain of pointers
p->q->bar on every reference -- even if it already has the address it needs
sitting in a register.  

I talked to Aztec tech support on the phone recently, though, and they say 
that a new version, scheduled for release in March (but it'll probably slip
by months -- they're pretty bad about doing that) which is full ANSI, including
prototypes, and does register tracking and global register allocation, so
it should generate much better code and also spurt Aztec ahead of Lattice
again until the Lattice people come out with their next version.

It's a good thing there are two C vendors for the Amiga.  If there were only
one it's doubtful it'd be as good as the two are, although I do not
think either meets the standards of the cardinal IBM PC C-compilers.
-- 
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